Designing your website is not just an exercise in aesthetics. Yes, there is no denying that the visual elements of your website are probably going to get the most attention. However, you need to bear in mind that a great website design also requires for you to consider what is under the hood and make improvements to it.
If the actual digital selling machine doesn’t fulfill its purpose, then the flashy exterior is not going to do you any good in the long term. It doesn’t matter much how beautiful your website looks if people are unable to find your website in search engines, find it difficult to navigate your website’s pages or cannot understand the information within.
The problem is that SEO is always evolving so most businesses make some common mistakes in regard to website design. What are they? The most common SEO mistakes in website design that need to be avoided at all costs are:
Mistake 1
Not thinking about SEO from the beginning: When you are contemplating your website design, you tend to focus on features that appeal to the eye because the glitz and glam make your webpages look like a million bucks. But, if you really want your website to resonate in your audience, your design strategy needs to have search marketing ingrained in it from the beginning. Consider your website a hotel. You can spend hundreds and thousands of dollars in building the most beautiful hotel, but you will be unable to do any business if no one knows how to find it. Hence, SEO needs to be incorporated from the very beginning.
Mistake 2
Not performing an audit on your existing website: Before you take a wrecking ball to your website and start demolishing it, you should take the time to examine it and figure out where it is troubling you. Some of the things you need to check include total number of pages indexed, top performing keywords in terms of lead generation, traffic and rank, number of visitors, visits and unique visitors, number of pages that receive traffic and total number of pages indexed. This makes it easy to make changes to the elements.
Mistake 3
Unable to figure out and include the right keywords: A new era has begun for search engine optimization and this is one where you cannot just stuff keywords in your website’s content and see a boost in its rankings. Nowadays, if search engines like Google discover that you are overusing your keywords blatantly or even hiding your keywords on your website, your rankings are going to suffer in a major way. Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that keywords are not important anymore. As a matter of fact, they are more important than ever for SEO. According to an expert from a Phoenix web design company, search engines actually want you to create high quality content around your keyword instead of just using it in the content over and over again.
Avoiding these mistakes in your website design is going to give your SEO efforts a good and solid boost.